Sunday, September 23: The A.D.D. Detective
The POWER of PREPOSITIONS
by Leigh Lundin
Aladdin was getting along in years and found that he was unable to pitch a tent as he had done in his youth. Smart as well as lucky, Aladdin still had his genie in a lamp and, frugal with his wishes, he had one wish left.
He rubbed his lamp and the genie appeared. "My camel can no longer thread the needle. Can you cure my erectile impotence?" Aladdin begged the genie.
Genie said, "I can whisk away your problem." With that, he rubbed his hands, evoking a puff of billowing blue smoke. Genie said, "I’ve dealt you a powerful spell, but at your age, you’ll be able to invoke it only once a year."
"How do I use it?" asked Aladdin.
"All you have to do is say ‘one two three’ and it shall rise for as long as you wish, but only once a year."
Aladdin asked, "What happens when I’m exhausted and I no longer want to continue?"
Genie replied, "All you or your woman has to say is ‘one two three four’, and it will go down. But be warned: the spell will not work again for another year!"
Aladdin galloped home, eager to try out his new powers of the flesh. That evening, Aladdin bathed and scented himself with oil of exotic myrrh. He climbed into bed where his wife lay on her side away from him.
Aladdin took a deep breath and said, "One two three." Instantly, he became more aroused than he ever had in youth, a magnificent happenstance of tree-trunk proportions.
His wife, hearing Aladdin’s words, rolled back toward him and said, "What did you say ‘one two three’ for?"
And that, dear readers, is why you should not end a sentence with a preposition.
Leigh,
Very funny, and brings up an interesting point. (Not that point.)
I keep hearing that the “can’t end a sentence with a preposition” rule is dead; the concept antiquated. Too many years of avoiding prepositional endings are ingrained in my brain. Unless it’s dialogue. I can’t write: “what’s it good for?” without images of Sister Patricia Anne floating before me saying: “Teresa, you know that is incorrect.”
So, the rule may be dead for some but not for me.
And if the rule is dead, what’s the world coming to?
Terrie
Funny! Pwerful as well.
So powerful I couldn’t spell!
And I thought “The Stain” was evil. Shame on you.
I’m reminded of the famous comment attributed to Winston Churchill, supposedly in response to an editor clumsily rewriting the Nobel laureate’s prose to avoid preposition-ending sentences: “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.”
Fowler says, “It is a cherished superstition that prepositions must, in spite of the incurable English instinct for putting them late … be kept true to their name & placed before the word they govern.”
He then gives a brief history of the controversy, starting with Dryden’s rewriting of all of his prefaces to eradicate the offending prepositions, then demonstrating how many of the best English stylists did not shy away from the practice, beginning with Chaucer and ending with Kipling.
He concludes by stating, “If it were not presumptuous … to offer advice, the advice would be: Follow no arbitrary rule, but remember that there are often two or more possible arrangements between which a choice should be consciously made; if the abnormal, or at least unorthodox, final preposition that has naturally presented itself sounds comfortable, keep it; if it does not sound comfortable, still keep it if it has compensating vigour, or when among awkward possibilities it is the least awkward.”
–Sgt. Warren of the DCPD
Leigh — This also comes perilously close to an old Groucho Marx maxim: Never end a sentence with a proposition.
— Dale
And I like the Genie line:
“Omnipotent? I thought you said impotent!”
Or the tag line about the young lady who returns to the convent where she was schooled and is asked by the Mother Superior what she has become in life. The young lady answers, the nun lookd shocked and asks her to repeat. The young lady does. Relieved, the nun says “Oh, a prostitute. I thought you said a protestant.”